


Phantom Cramps

by neoqueentitania



Category: Sword Art Online (Anime & Manga)
Genre: I'm Bad At Titles, M/M, Periods, Soulmate AU, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, injured soulmate au, period, trans!kirito
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22327600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neoqueentitania/pseuds/neoqueentitania
Summary: When your soulmate hurts, you feel it too. Eugeo just wishes his soulmate would take a painkiller.
Relationships: Eugeo/Kirigaya Kazuto | Kirito
Comments: 4
Kudos: 97





	Phantom Cramps

**Author's Note:**

> Pry my trans boy Kirito from my cold, dead, trans hands.  
> I wrote this as a more light-hearted version of my other fic on this idea, where I sorta broke my own heart (I'm so sorry). That one's called Broken Souls, if you're interested in it. ♥

Eugeo groaned in pain again, curling into a tighter ball on his bed. His stomach ached, but he couldn’t quite name where. When he’d told his friend, Alice, she’d laughed and joked that his soulmate must have been on her period, and Eugeo had sighed and told her he wished they’d take a painkiller. He didn’t have the energy to deal with phantom menstrual cramps. Besides, soulmates were meant to put butterflies in your stomach, not cramps.

Soulmates, as he’d been told, were your once-in-a-lifetime dream come true meeting, the fairytale endings people always dreamed about. You could find them, though it wasn’t easy. But when your soulmate was injured, you were too. It was meant to be poetic, nobody would ever truly hurt alone. Some people found their soulmates when they threw a punch to the guy across the bar, only to feel it echo back across their own cheek. Others never found their soulmates, forever haunted by the pain of a phantom bullet through their chest that they’d never know the story behind.

It always fascinated him, the idea of never finding your soulmate.  _ What was someone’s calling in life if not to be in love _ , he’d wondered on many occasions. Then he’d wondered if, perhaps, there were more types of soulmates. Maybe the people you were friends with who felt like a family, maybe they were soulmates, too, in their own ways. Maybe that was it. 

Still, he spent many nights like this, distracting himself from his soulmate’s pain, wondering if his soulmate was wondering about him. Did they ever think of him when he was in pain? He wasn’t sure, and he was much too careful to ever cause his soulmate harm. Maybe they thought of him when they were hurting and felt guilty for it. He hoped they didn’t, he didn’t need them feeling any worse than they likely already did.

“Fu-”

“Language.”

“Fudge.” Eugeo corrected himself, biting down on a pillow to avert his attention from the throbbing spreading across his abdomen. 

“You want fudge?” Alice asked, almost laughing at the sight of her normally serious friend being reduced to a cursing, wailing mess.

Eugeo nodded his head, screaming into his pillow as Alice walked off to retrieve him a snack. He hoped that would help his stomach a little. His concern suddenly fell to his soulmate, and he desperately hoped that, wherever and whoever they happened to be, they were okay and resting. Maybe they didn’t feel cramps quite as badly as he did, maybe they felt them even worse, given the fact that they wouldn’t have been missing a critical organ to the process.

Alice returned, handing Eugeo a bar of fudge that he greedily bit into, muffling his pained sobs with the sweet as the pain intensified. Was his soulmate hurting? Was someone hurting his soulmate? What if he’d been wrong and his soulmate was being hurt, and that he should have been helping them instead of grumbling and feeling sorry for himself? What if-

“Alice what if they’re hurting?” Eugeo asked, on the verge of tears.

The girl simply shrugged as she walked out of the room again, “I don’t know. I’m sure she’s fine,”

Eugeo sighed, rolling over again, taking a pen and writing pad from his bedside table and beginning to roughly scribble on it.

‘ _ To my soulmate, _ ’ he began, handwriting messier than it normally would have been had he not been in so much pain, ‘ _ I’m sure you’re a lovely girl, maybe you aren’t even a girl at all, in which case I’m doubly sorry that you have to go through this. I hope I will be able to look after you when your period causes grief, and I hope you’ll return the favour to me when it hurts me as well. Signed, Eugeo. _ ’

He tore the paper from the pad, then stuffed it inside the drawer of the side table, it joining his ever-growing collection of notes to his soulmate. Most were quick little letters he’d write before bed to tell them about his day, some were sadder on days he felt helpless, some were poems he’d write about finding his soulmate someday, some were long enthusiastic letters about his friends. He hoped someday he’d be able to share the letters with them, maybe relive some memories he’d forgotten.

He closed the drawer and pulled the blanket over himself, putting a hand over his stomach. He’d try to fall asleep and hoped that, when he woke up, both of them were in significantly less pain. He didn’t want his soulmate to be hurting any longer.

Thankfully, when he woke up he was in a lot less pain, his stomach now simply in a dull ache of hunger rather than the blindingly painful cramps he’d been experiencing the day before. He decided that, objectively, it was much better, and he hoped that if he ate fast enough he would stop the pain before his soulmate could wake up and experience it. The last thing they needed was more pain after the day they’d had before.

He dressed quickly, ate breakfast and made his way towards the markets. He needed to buy more flower seeds and another gardening trowel for his garden. He’d started it spring of the year before last, and he was pleasantly surprised with how well it had been growing. He loved flowers, blue roses were his favourites, and he’d managed to plant enough of them to give away bouquets to his friends when they looked down or occasionally sell them when he needed extra money.

He made his way through the town square, humming to himself as he walked through stalls of fresh fruits and delicious smelling pastries, getting lost in his own world as he walked past crowds of people all carrying on with their own lives while he carried on with his, their paths never crossing.

He’d never see most of these people again, and at the end of the day they’d all go back to their homes and their lives, and today wouldn’t have changed anything for any of them, his presence wouldn’t have changed anything for any of them, and their presence wouldn’t have changed anything for him.

Thoughts like that were so fascinating to him. He played a role in someone’s life, maybe Alice’s or his other friend’s, and certainly his soulmate’s life - someone he’d never even met yet. But here, in the marketplace of people carrying on their mundane lives, he was nothing but an insignificant speck to the grand plan of their lives.

He’d never mean anything to anybody here.

He sighed and stopped at the market store he bought seeds from, standing in line behind a raven-haired young man dressed in all black, counting his coins in his hand as he walked up to the stall.

“Can I please have a little bouquet?” The man asked, his voice quiet and soft, “I’d like it to have some daffodils and-” he pulled a note from his pants pocket, “daffodils, daisies and statice?”

The woman behind the counter nodded her head and turned to start collecting the flowers, soon presenting him with the small bouquet and collecting the payment for it. The man thanked her gratefully, smelling the flowers once before turning back to leave.

That was when he bumped into Eugeo, the pair of them both lost in their thoughts, colliding with each other before they could stop themselves. 

Eugeo began to laugh, then stopped. Why did his arm suddenly hurt? He hadn’t hit his arm on anything, and the only thing that had happened was he saw this boy walk into him and accidentally hit his arm against his chest.

_ Well then. _

Eugeo held out a hand for the boy, helping him get stable on his feet again, laughing as he apologised just about a thousand times, both of them blushing.

“This is odd for me to say,” Eugeo began, “but by any chance did you hurt your arm just now?”

The other boy looked at him in confusion, “Yes?”

“I… I think that we might possibly be…” Eugeo trailed off, looking around for any way to avoid an awkward conversation. Serious conversations weren’t his thing, especially not one as important as this one.

“Soulmates?” The other boy asked, almost too eagerly, then his smile faded, “Oh no, I’m so sorry, I probably have a lot to explain. Can we sit down? Wait, buy your flowers first, do you need me to buy them for you? I can buy them for you, can you find us-”

“Calm down,” Eugeo laughed, putting a hand tentatively on his shoulder, “I’ll buy my seeds and you can find us a place to sit, okay?”

The other boy nodded, and Eugeo walked to the stall to buy as many seeds as he could afford. He wanted more roses, as well as some calla lilies and lilacs. The woman gave him a knowing look as he paid her, winking as she handed the packets of seeds to him.

“Good luck, let me know how it goes next time I see you,” she smiled as he thanked her and rushed to where he found his newfound soulmate sitting nervously on a bench, nervously bouncing his leg up and down.

“H-hey,” Eugeo sat down next to him, “So, what’s your name?”

“Kirito,”

“Eugeo,” they shook hands, albeit awkwardly, then fell into silence again.

“I suppose you have a few questions about… y’know…” Kirito looked awkwardly down at his feet.

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, okay?” 

“No, no, I feel bad,” Kirito took a deep breath, “So, basically, I’m a guy, but I’m a trans guy, so I still had my… you know what…”

“That explains it,” Eugeo almost laughed, which made Kirito’s face turn a bright red.

“Please tell me you didn’t feel that too,” he mumbled, burying his face in his hands, guilty that Eugeo had been in pain because of him. Maybe if his body had co-operated sooner, he would’ve spared them both the hassle.

“It’s fine. If you’re my soulmate, I’d take a sword for you, I swear it!” Eugeo over-exaggerated crossing his fingers over his heart, making Kirito laugh a little.

“Don’t go dying on me now that we’ve just met,” he joked, shuffling a little closer to him.

They spoke for a while more, Eugeo intrigued by everything Kirito had to say. They most spoke about times they thought of each other, Eugeo blushing as he admitted to writing a novel’s worth of letters to Kirito, Kirito admitting he thought of who his soulmate might be a lot when he walked through the market streets.

“Do you think we could go back to my dorm room?” Eugeo asked as he stretched his arms above his head.

“Sure, that sounds really great, I’d love to see this garden of yours,” Kirito stood up, taking Eugeo by the hand and walking through the market together.

Their fingers almost naturally intertwined together, their hand fitting against each other perfectly. Maybe that’s what convinced Eugeo they were soulmates, maybe that’s one of the reasons they were soulmates in the first place. Maybe they were made completely perfect for one another, to fit together like a perfect puzzle piece.

“Hey, Alice, look who I found!” Eugeo called as they walked through the doors. Alice walked out, nearly dropping the slice of toast she’d been eating when she saw her friend lovingly holding hands with a stranger.

“Is he your-”

“Soulmate? Yeah, he is,” Eugeo looked smugly at her as he put an arm proudly around Kirito’s shoulders.

“Well I have some apologising to do,” Alice sighed, sitting on the chair in the corner of her and Eugeo’s room. 

Kirito nervously sat down on Eugeo’s bed, Eugeo sitting next to him, watching him talk with all the wonder somebody could ever see another person with, staring incredulously at the boy he was able to spend the rest of his life getting to know and getting to fall in love with, even if he’d fallen in love with him a thousand times over the first time he’d even been introduced to the concept of a soulmate.

The morning turned to dusk before any of them realised, and Eugeo decided it was safest for Kirito to spend the night with them, lending him a spare set of clothes to wear to bed, practically melting when he saw Kirito in his blue shirt, curled into his bed like an angel.

“You’ve got it bad, buddy,” Alice snickered as she climbed into her own bed, watching her friend make himself comfortable on the floor next to his bed.

“Maybe if you found a soulmate of your own, you’d understand,” Eugeo stuck his tongue out at her as he reached up to hold Kirito’s hand.

He felt him lace their fingers together once more as they fell asleep, and Eugeo felt happier than he ever had in his entire life. They’d need to learn about each other, grow with each other, understand each other a little more. They needed to take the time to form a relationship from their bond, but they could do that in the years to come. They had all the time in the world to fall in love, now.

But maybe he’d fallen in love just at the touch of his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Flower meanings:  
> Lilac: First love.  
> Daisies and daffodils: New beginnings.  
> Calla lilies: Major life transitions (get it? Because Kirito's trans... That's a bad pun, I'm sorry.)


End file.
